Welcome to the Conservation Ecology Research Group! We are a group of researchers based at Durham University, in Durham, United Kingdom. Our work ranges from the evolutionary ecology of individual behaviour to the drivers of global biogeographic patterns, usually with a strong applied focus.

​﻿Recent News

A number of PhD students will be joining the group later this year, after recently being awarded studentships/funding to study here. To read more about what they will be working on, see our News page.

This year we have welcomed a number of new PhD and Masters students to the group. To read about their research projects, take a look at their profiles on our People page.

Together with colleagues at the Institute of Zoology in London, and Brazil's federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Phil and Steve have a new paper out in Ecology Letters, looking at the limits to population density in birds and mammals. The paper is here. Read about the motivation for this work, as well as some of the findings in this blog post.

Phil has a "Dispatches" piece out in Current Biology, profiling the importance of a new paper that links diet and luck to behaviour and population dynamics. The paper is here. Read about the link between this and previous research on the determinants of carnivore population density in this blog post.

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Christine and Phil have a new paper out in Conservation Letters investigating the drivers of threatened species richness patterns. The open access paper is from a collaboration with Curt Flather from the USDA Forest Service. Read about it in our blog post here.

Congratulations to Pen and Claire for both recently successfully defending their PhD theses!

Pen has a new paper out in Natural Resource Modeling. The paper investigates the effects of disturbance and fecundity-tolerance strategies on community composition and uses macrofaunal communities at deep‐sea hydrothermal vents as a case study. Find out more here.